There has been a lot going on in our family and ministry, so we wanted to fill you in on all the latest and greatest details.

Since the beginning of the year, we’ve been using Oostburg, Wisconsin as our base of operations. First Oostburg Christian Reformed Church was incredibly kind to outfit the church’s youth house as a place for us to live. It has been a wonderful blessing as a place of work and rest for us.

In early January, Ben returned to Thailand for a week and a half to support the ministries of Pastor Boonchu. Pastor Boonchu’s support committee, called Karen Advisory Partnership (KAP), held a meeting in Chiang Mai where we discussed important issues related to Pastor Boonchu’s ministry and how we support him.

Ben also had the opportunity to teach at a conference in the mountains for Karen ministry leaders. Along with two other American pastors, taught from 1 Corinthians 3, helping them to understand how to work in unity...

As we’ve shared in our last couple of blog posts, we have a lot of changes and a lot of opportunities in our future. God has opened doors for ministry that we never imagined seeing. We are incredibly grateful to Him for these gifts.

If you need to get caught up on our prior blog posts you can click HERE for the first post, and HERE for the second post.

In my first blog post I described the vision we share with Pastor Ogaat to build a church planting network in Thailand. As part of this process, we are hoping to bring Pastor Ogaat and his wife, Khruu Taay, to the U.S. to begin sharing this vision with people and churches. (Right now it looks like they will be with us from about March 10 to about May 12, 2018.

There are lots of reasons why bringing them to the US is an important move for us and our future ministry:

First, it is very important to give Pastor Ogaat and opportunity to meet with leadership at Serge so we can begin building a...

As you can tell from our previous blog post, we have some exciting ministry opportunities in our future. It often feels like God is handing us a ministry gold mine. All we need to do is get to work! If you missed the previous blog post, you can read it by clicking HERE.

As we prepare to pursue these opportunities, we wanted to fill you in on some of the steps and changes we need to make for this to take place.

When we discussed these opportunities with MTW, it became evident that MTW wasn't in a position to expand in this direction. It is our desire to be good stewards of the connections, relationships, and opportunities God has laid before us. So, with MTW's blessing, we are making plans to leave MTW and pursue a relationship with a different mission organization called Serge.

We love MTW. We honestly believed we would spend many, many years working with MTW. So changing organizations is a bittersweet reality for us. But as...

As the day gets closer when we will hop on an airplane and return to the U.S. for our first home assignment, Becca and I are realizing that we have a lot to share with you. There have been a number of developments in our lives and ministry that will be important for you to know before we get home.

But because we have so much information to share, we are going to be breaking the story into a few different emails that we will send out over the next few days. We don’t want to overwhelm you with too much information. So please keep an eye on your inbox to make sure you hear the entire story!

For this first email, we’d like to share the exciting ministry opportunities that God is opening up for us here in Thailand! This story is so exciting that it’s been hard not to share it with you until now!!!

When we first arrived in Thailand, we began attending a little Thai church called Cool Shade of Life. We initially went there because we...

Our update for October will be short but important! Here’s the big news:

We’re coming home for our home assignment!!!

We apologize for such short notice, but we will be returning to the US in early December. We expect to be staying from December until late July/early August. Lord willing, we would like to return to Thailand before our kids’ 2018/2019 school year begins in August.

It’s crazy for us to think that it’s already time for a home assignment. It feels like our time in Thailand has flown by!

One of the most important things we’ll be doing while we’re in the US is sharing with supporters and anyone interested, what we’ve been doing while in Thailand. In fact, we would love to start scheduling personal meetings and church visits. If you would like to get some time with us, please contact Ben (pastorbenjohnson@gmail.com) to arrange a time for a chat or presentation.

Back in July, Ben was able to travel into the mountains with our summer interns. We worked with a Christian school named Sahamitwittiya School, to teach English for their students. On one day, they had the local provincial office of emergency management come and give safety training to the students. This video is a training on how to handle cooking gas fires. It's pretty hands on!